Strange New World: Picks of the Week

July 26, 2007 — -- Life in the Gadget-O-Sphere slowed to a crawl this past week. The summer holiday consumer electronics demonstrations that give us the final look at what will be in stores this winter are safely out of the way. There was no new, new thing: iPhone is still the only gadget that matters.

So our thoughts -- and our picks for the week -- turn to larger, more transcendent, even other-worldly items: the possible mutation of Google into a telecom company, the strange twist in a $100 laptop designed for the developing world, and our first pick of the year nominee: our brave Martian rovers.

Here, then, are the top three for the week.

There is a life-and-death drama unfolding on the surface of Mars -- never mind that it is the life and death of a mere machine. Our two Martian rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, and their human handlers at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif., have been fighting to stay operational during a month-long Martian dust storm.

There is enough junk blowing around in the frigid Martian air up there to hide 99 percent of the sunlight, and these units need that sunlight to power themselves. Mission commanders have had to try every trick to keep them in the game and now the rovers do just about nothing more than stay warm and report back every two or three days.

Whether doom awaits these brave little R2-D2s or not, their performance already has been nothing short of miraculous. These units were expected to operate for just 90 days; now more than three years later, much to their creators' astonishment, they're still at it: pushing back the thin line of what we know from what we don't.

NASA takes its fair share of abuse these days for its poorly funded, ludicrously political space missions. But on this day, on this field, they are the champions: This round of Martian mobile exploration is a singular design, engineering, operational, and most important, scientific achievement.